Another First Step
by HVK
Summary: A weird and only slightly choherent look at Zuko in a reality where the world was destroyed by things from the dark, him looking back and finding hope from a stranger's words.


I'll be honest here; I haven't much idea what's going on. I just started writing angsty stuff from Zuko's perspective, and this weirdness is what happened. It's in a Kingdom Hearts-ish worldview, with a decidedly dark feel, but aside from that, your guess is as good as mine. That said, I thought the writing was pretty good, so you tell me what I'm trying to say and I'll have the good grace to you the credit.

Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar: The Last Airbender. That honor belongs to those geniuses Brian and Mike. Neither do I own any other intellectual properties I may have stumbled upon by accident. Also, you can spot a Fullmetal Alchemist reference if you look sideways and squint. That belongs to Hiromu Arakawa, who surely belongs in the entirely figurative Gallery of Freaking Genuises right along Brian and Mike. If my praise seems effusive, it's for good reason.

* * *

So much had changed, but in a very real sense, things were just the same.

It was an old saying. It was contradictory in semantics, but all too true in meaning. To the boy he had been once, it had made no sense, none at all, but now it made far too much.

He was a prime example; this withered but somehow sinewy husk looked different from the never-a-boy he had been but anyone who'd known him then would recognize him at once. Maybe his pale skin flashed with dull red-orange when the light struck him or his skin tensed, maybe his every breath was a small spark of flame, maybe sometimes his every thought was driven by the elemental fire infused in the very core of his body-in his _soul_-but so much was still recognizable.

The bristly black hair, for instance. He had kept it in a shaved topknot until he had let it grow out again, first short and spiky until he started to see clearly and let it grow longer. Now it was so long that it was an elbow-long tangle, fell over his face and mingled in the short beard that was so much like the long-dead man who had been his father in spirit, if not in blood. _You never think things through,_ that man had once chided him. And he was right. As the loneliness and loss had consumed him, he'd stopped caring. About the world, about himself, and espically his hygene.

His yellow eyes were unchanged, even if they sometimes glimmered with a red-orange glow like a dragon's, or a roaring bonfire.

His features looked so much the same, and so damnably like the man that was his father by birth and had renounced that claim through his actions nearly every day of his life. Even admist the tangle, that man's most enduring reminder, his most immediate expression of the essential heartlessness that had characterized him was emblazoned on his flesh, around his right eye, squinted by muscle damage and the ear shriveled into a pitiful comma.

The scar was in it's own way a comforting thing. A cold lump of mutilated flesh that nonetheless soothed his soul whenever he had thought tortured dreamings of truly being his father's son, being _Ozai's _son. He looked so much like his forebear's, like Sozin, Azulong and Ozai, but he was nothing like him. They were never marred like he was, because their mutilations were where no physician or observer could see them. Their's were disfigurements of the soul, and his most obvious scar was plain to see.

He didn't used to think so. Thoughts like that had always been reserved for thoughts of the time _before_. Such a short word, for such a terrible thought. Before running and emptiness and being alone. Before the Fire Nation was drowned in a sea of darkness and the rest of the world with it.

Before he had lost all hope for himself. Before his world burned.

Back then, things had made sense. He had been the Fire Lord, the hope of his country. A fire, flickering against the dark, a hope that he might lead his homeland in atoning for the sins of his forefathers. And now, more importantly to him, he'd had a family. Not one bound to him by mere ties of blood and madness, but one forged by the horror of war, made with bonds of affection, friendship and forgiveness.

But that was before he had seen his uncle die, before he had seen his friends, his _family,_ taken by the darkness and leaving him alone.

Or so he'd thought.

The six years since then had been hard. Worse than that. A living death for him, each day empty and harsh. On the better ones, he felt that he might rise from his past like a dragon soaring from ashen remains, might at the very least go out in a blaze in silent commeration of who his real family had been, a bright memorial of the man they had ultimately remade him into. In others, he struggled to survive simply because it was habit, just because he had always done it, constantly fought against a storm of pain and obstacles because he had been doing it because he had been lucky to be born and that had been the last time Fate had smiled on him.

It was moods like that he resented afterwards. They weren't pleasant, when the long-dead coals where determination and resolve had been weighed against his soul, reminded him of what he had been: a banished prince that had first betrayed the world by fighting to capture it's only hope, betrayed his uncle for the hope of a place in a father's empty heart, and betrayed his own heritage by fueling his birthright with hatred and rage, things contradictory to the spirit of Firebending. There had been that long, shining moment, when he had turned his back on betrayal and joined the Avatar and his friends, earned their trust piece by piece, their friendship, and even though he knew he would never deserve it, their forgiveness, their love. And he betrayed the memory of them in those lapses of courage, when he survived simply because he was too cold to do anything else.

Now, though...things had changed.

The stranger's words in his self-imposed exile had lit a spark to those long-dead coals, lit them like a tinder to dry brush and sent a roaring blaze throughout his entire being, igniting a fire that made him remember what it was like to be more than this husk of Fire Lord Zuko, this miserable shell of the man he could have been. He still didn't know who that stranger was, that haunted man with eyes as yellow and haunted as his, a mechanical arm and a red-hued shadow that seemed _alive _with half-seen eyes and claws, and he didn't much care. The only thing that mattered to him were five words. Simple words, but they meant more than his empire brought back to him again.

_"Your true family still lives."_

Zuko took a deep breath, fire billowing in his lungs, and breathed out just as deeply. His breath became fire and burnt off much of the unkempt growth on his face. He brought a hand to his face and his fingers were tipped with small, hot flames. Slowly, methodically, he drew it across his jawline and upper lip, not close enough to burn him but still close enough to burn off a significant remainder of the beard. Not all of it; he left several tufts and a short goatee like the facial hair his uncle had favored. Even if his uncle was dead, at least he could honor him in this small way. He could look like his blood-father, but this way he could _feel _like his real father; Iroh.

Something had changed. Oh yes, something had definitely changed. He was _burning_ again, a good burning this time, those flames of hope alive again.

His hair he left. It seemed right; the shorter his hair was, the more he backslide into the depravity and delusion his family had brought on themselves. A shaved-head and a topknot was insanity. Short and spiky was bitterness and self-pity. Long and unkempt was the brightest time of his life. Maybe long enough to cover his shoulderblades meant something good.

Now there were two 'befores'. There was the before of shining _rightness_, after he'd joined Aang and his family, after he became one of them and fulfilled part of his destiny and just before the world had been consumed by the darkness incarnate, with yellow soulless eyes and endless hunger.

He increased the ambient tempeture of his body just enough to scour the dirt and grime that acclumated on him. He had cared so little about his body, the ritual cleanliness of his station had faded away until now.

Now, there too was the before of darkness. Six years of pain and darkness, filled with pointless fighting while his inner fire went cold even if he could still Firebend somehow. Six years of emptiness, hurtful understandings and comprehension in all the failures he had been writ large.

That before was dead, now. Ashes left in the wake of a new blazing drive perhaps less altruistic than the drive he'd once held to stop Ozai's evil and then to turn the Fire Nation from shame back to sanity, but no less intense. If anything, the sole salvation now avaiable to him was even stronger, now that he had nothing else left to him.

As always, he felt a fool for his mistakes. He felt so stupid for giving up on them so easily, when they'd always been so much stronger than him, emotionally and physically. There had been a cruel poetry in it: the weakest and worst of their family lives while everyone else dies with the world. He should have known better.

The ghost of a defiant statement comes back to him, fresh with the heat of boiling water, the fear of discovery and the sounds of prison: _Fall down seven times, get up seven bazillion times!_ Or something to that effect. It is perhaps not so strange that this perhaps mangled retelling of Sokka's words can make him smile.

For the second time, this husk of the last Firebender (or so he thought) stands up.

And Zuko takes another first step back home.


End file.
